We should note that all of these places of thermal extremes (Finnish saunas, Japanese hot baths, American beaches and mountains) have their opposites close at hand. There are possibly two reasons for having the extremes right next to each other.
The first is physiological: the availability of extremes ensures that we can move from one to the other to maintain a thermal balance.
The second might be termed aesthetic: the experience of each extreme is made more acute by contrast to the other.
Works of art which have great life often have intense contrast within: rough/smooth, solid/void, loud/silent, empty/full. It is the difference between opposites which gives birth to something. Contrast is what often gives other principles their degree of life – the intensity of the boundary, the markedness of the alternating repetition.
Contrast strengthens centers by making each a deeper entity of itself, and thereby giving deeper meaning to both. It is, at its simplest, what allows us to differentiate. But meaningless contrast remains meaningless. It is only when centers are actively, mutually, and meaningfully composed that it acts to deepen the whole.
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.